Cash offer for clubs to relocate

Page Tools

Man in the middle: NRL boss David Gallop answers questions after announcing no new club would be admitted to the competition in 2006. Photo: Brendan Esposito

NRL partnership directors yesterday discussed offering clubs financial incentives to relocate after turning down applications from the Central Coast, Gold Coast and Wellington to join the competition in 2006.

Partnership directors spoke for around three hours at NRL headquarters in Sydney before unanimously deciding against bringing in a 16th team, promising to again consider the issue in 12 months' time.

But in a major development with wide-ranging implications for the future of the game, News Limited and the ARL mulled over the possibility of revisiting 1998, when teams were offered grants of $6 million - later increased to $8 million - to merge. Six took the bait, forming three mergers of which two survive today.

Under the proposal tossed around yesterday, similarly generous grants would be on offer to existing clubs - as long as they moved to strategically identified areas headed by yesterday's unsuccessful applicants, Central Coast, Gold Coast and Wellington.

"You have asked me whether there was some discussion about relocation incentives - I can confirm it was discussed," NRL chief executive David Gallop said last night. "There was some talk about it. Beyond that, I can't comment."

AdvertisementAdvertisement

The first step towards nudging existing clubs in the direction of relocations along the lines of the Sydney Swans and Brisbane Lions will be incentives to move matches next season.

The NRL has previously refused to dangle such carrots but when asked if that policy might change, Gallop said: "Yes. There is an increasing trend for clubs to look into their options regarding where they play their games and to consider high-standard facilities which give them a good return.

"There is a possibility there of financial incentives."

Gosford, Carrara, Wellington, Christchurch, Perth and Adelaide are all in line to host premiership games next season.

And so, what was greeted by the unsuccessful consortia last night as a dark day for rugby league may eventually go down as one on which the game set a carefully-managed strategy to return to a truly national competition on the back of an overhauled financial structure.

When Gallop was asked at a media conference what would be different in 12 months that would make a decision on expansion more informed, he pointed to a new poker-machine tax in NSW that is expected to savage grants to clubs, which now amount to between $15 million and $19 million a year.

He also said it was an objective of the league to lessen the sport's reliance on those grants. With a relocation incentive, the poker-machine tax might actually help the competition achieve its objectives. The effects of the tax would encourage NSW-based NRL clubs to accept the carrot and move, leaving the game decentralised and more self-sufficient all at once.

"With the poker-machine tax coming up, with the clubs looking at the venues that they're playing at at the moment, it is probably something that is in their minds," Gallop said.

"What we've said always was that if a club was to come to us and say they were interested in relocation ... we're not going to force it on anybody but we've certainly got an open mind to it.

"We'll be looking at that if a club came forward. The existing bids have put a lot of work in but at least some of them have indicated in the past that a relocated team is not out of the question."

Another x-factor is the competition's free-to-air television contract, which is not up for renegotiation until the end of 2007 and is therefore seen as irrelevant to expansion before then.

But it is possible it will be renegotiated much sooner than that, perhaps allowing the NRL to finance the relocation incentives or - more likely - give new clubs more significant financial help than their predecessors.

Gallop reiterated that the competition does have a strategic plan - never made public - and revealed it called for the competition to "define and achieve an appropriate geographical spread".

That spread has now been defined as "dominating the heartland" - including Gold Coast and Central Coast - and then going national on both sides of the Tasman. "It's obviously a fair way off, to be as widespread as - say - the AFL but it is something that's in the back of our minds for the future," he said.